Growers Edge, a financial technology (fintech) company, has built a suite of data-driven solutions that introduce growers to new products and practices that can improve their operations, mitigate risk, and provide access to the capital needed. Growers Edge partners with U.S. ag retailers and input manufacturers to design and deliver solutions that can help growers protect their investments and farm more efficiently.
The agtech industry is constantly producing new and innovative products and services for a grower to consider. While each of them collects and uses a vast amount of data, most have big promises but very few guarantees.
Growers Edge understands how overwhelming it can be for the grower and the ag retailer to determine whether adopting a new product will give the grower the extra edge they need to grow their operation. However, the sheer amount of options can be daunting.
“Cutting through the clutter of all of these product options and digesting our customers’ data is a big challenge. It will continue to be a challenge until a uniform way of collecting and processing data can be established,” said Ross Sickora, Software Engineer Manager, Growers Edge.
Increasing Developer Capacity:
When Growers Edge was founded in 2016, their goal was to leverage data science to build grower-relevant risk management solutions to meet the demands of farmers across the country.
Because of their broad customer base, Growers Edge understands they need to be compatible with a wide array of agronomic data, including OEM and operations information, for their data scientists and engineers to analyze. They quickly realized how challenging and time consuming it would be to internally analyze and integrate the vast amount of data.
“Because the agtech space is so widely fragmented, this creates a mountain of work for our engineering team to meet the bare minimum of data needed to support our products. To scale and grow our business, we knew conducting the data integration ourselves was not sustainable long term,” said Sickora.
They recognized they did not have the developer capacity to decipher data integrations on a one-by-one basis and immediately saw the potential of Leaf’s unified API to help them scale.
“Trying to do this internally would have been a very slow process, with a steep learning curve that would have kept us from servicing our partners. It’s unlikely we would be able to offer all of the capabilities on our future product roadmaps without partnering with Leaf,” said Sickora.
Using One API Integration to Increase Efficiency:
To continue to serve their partners and build future product roadmaps quickly and efficiently, Growers Edge collaborated with Leaf for data analysis and integration. Using Leaf’s unified API, they were able to:
- Access standardized data from multiple agriculture data platforms through one integration
- Easily translate USB thumb drive machine data
- Get instant support and offload ongoing integration maintenance
“Leaf has become a real workforce multiplier for Growers Edge. Having access to multiple electronic data interchange platforms through one integration has reduced the burden on our team. Leaf has also provided excellent support and even enhanced its platform to support some of our specific needs,” said Sickora.
Because of Leaf’s easy to use data integration, Growers Edge is better able to serve their customers, build products ahead of schedule, increase API integrations, and reduce data integration engineering costs.
“Initially, Leaf has helped us reduce our engineering time for integrations in a massive way, and then again as we add each new integration,” said Sickora. “Additionally, the expertise Leaf has provided in determining which providers have the most widely used platforms, and the most used data points on those platforms, is helping to better shape our products.”
Through industry expertise and real-time support, Growers Edge found that Leaf helped them overcome the fragmented agtech ecosystem and arduous process of data integration to scale their business for future growth. “Leaf’s API and knowledge let our engineers focus on product differentiators rather than common capabilities,” said Sickora. “In addition, Leaf’s responsiveness and support have been impressive as we have worked through our first EDI integrations. This expertise is helping us build the right thing for growers the first time, which is invaluable to our speed-to-market.”
Streamlining API Integrations to Build Products Faster and More Efficiently:
Through Leaf’s unified API, Growers Edge was able to scale their API partner network and build products faster and more efficiently for their customers, resulting in:
- Reduction in engineering time on integrations.
- Became compatible with all partners via Leaf’s API.
- Expedited progress toward their sales targets.
- Automated and frictionless onboarding for their customers.
- Real-time support and customer service for their software engineering team.
- Elimination of internal backend maintenance or data translation.
“Besides the API infrastructure, we love working with Leaf because of their expertise, responsive communication, and their workforce multiplication,” said Sikora. “With a little administrative work on our side, we get all of the benefits of the hard work the Leaf team puts into each integration. If a company needs a partner who is an expert in building high-level data integrations and extremely responsive and supportive, there is an easy answer. Hire Leaf!”
